God of the Rodeo Read online

  The traffic lights turn blue tomorrow….

  The band didn’t end up playing at the rodeo. The first weekend in October they had been slow to wake for an early-morning rehearsal at the stadium, a rehearsal that was supposed to help the rodeo livestock get used to the music so the animals wouldn’t spook during the event. And, depending on who was recounting the episode, one of the musicians had talked back at a senior employee. Immediately Warden Cain had substituted a haphazard outcamp group and abolished Myron’s band permanently. He’d announced, “Y’all won’t touch an instrument again as long as I’m warden of this penitentiary!” Yet while I sympathized with the musicians and felt almost bereft that I would never again hear Myron play the guitar, and while I wondered always about Cain’s excesses, I wondered equally why these prisoners, who’d been given the privilege of touring the state, hadn’t just gotten their butts out of bed.

  And overriding everything was Cain’s intention to lead people who no one else wanted to deal with, men who society wanted to forget. He meant to lead them up from the bottom.

  His hope was not based in naiveté. When he spoke of the heart of his program, when he recalled what his mother had once told him, “ ‘The Lord put you in that job—it’s a wonderful place to fish,’ “ he added, “You can never catch all the fish. You might not catch but a few.” When he talked of a “religious explosion” at Angola (“And I don’t mean just the Protestant religion, I mean all religions, I mean the Koran,” he said to me, whose Judaism, he teased, was “like unleavened bread waiting for the right ingredient to rise”), he acknowledged that many attended services only to win his favor. “But at least they’re going. At least they’re pretending. At least they’re acting like God-fearing people. And doing all that acting, they might change from the outside in.”

  And to all the inmates, whether or not they took part in religion, he had announced his own slogan of behavior modification: “I’ll be as nice as you let me, and as mean as you make me.”

  “If they’re going to act crazy and bad,” he explained to me, “I’ll make it so they don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t mean physically. I mean, take it to Camp J, do what you have to do. I mean, take take take—to where they don’t get anything to put on but a paper gown, to where they don’t eat anything but the food loaf.” The loaf consisted of the ingredients in the regular inmate meal, minus all seasoning, put in a blender and whipped into a gelatinous log. It was served without a utensil. “I mean, take their dignity, and then say, ‘Here, you can have this back as soon as you behave.’ ”

  Did I believe in God? All kinds of things rushed through my head when he asked that question. As with many of the inmates, I thought of the warden’s favor. I needed my own privileges at the prison. He could legally bar me from Angola, his world. Or, wanting only his own version of Angola written, he could decide abruptly that my time with the convicts would be spent with a staff escort, something we had agreed would not be necessary. There was plenty at stake in my answer. But also like some of the inmates, I had my own religious belief, regardless of my need to please. Yet it was never certain or solid; it was the flimsiest thing.

  I couldn’t tell Cain, I hope to feel God’s presence at Angola—I wouldn’t sound like much of a journalist, and I might sound plainly manipulative. And because I had been raised without religion, surrounded by people who saw it as the enemy of human progress, expressing anything about God was the last thing I wished to do.

  “Warden Cain,” I said, in the dark little office, “I come from a different place than you do.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “For all kinds of reasons, my yes can’t be the same as yours.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “But I do,” I said.

  “Well, that’s good, that’s good.”

  I knew I had given a self-serving answer. Still, I felt that I had spoken the truth to a man who, in his own way, understood.

  Cain was a kind of apotheosis. So much before him had been so degraded. From the end of the Civil War until 1900, 10 percent of Louisiana’s convicts had died every year.

  That was when the state leased its prisoners to private business. The system was used throughout the South, and took a variety of forms. Some state governments stayed responsible, in part, for their convicts, for feeding them, guarding them. In Louisiana, all control was ceded to the lessee, a former Confederate major named Samuel James. Most of the men in his charge were imprisoned for larceny, with sentences ranging from one to five years. Six years was the estimated life expectancy for those with longer terms.

  Louisiana preferred not to spend a cent for the keeping—let alone the rehabilitation—of its criminals. It wanted its criminals to turn a profit for the state. Since emancipation, the convicts were increasingly, overwhelmingly, black. The plantation no longer fed and punished. Blacks were poor; many of them stole. In 1860 they made up less than one third of the men imprisoned in Louisiana. By 1869, when Major James signed his lease, it was 70 percent. James hired out his men to lay track for the New Orleans and Pacific Railroad, to build levees which were the responsibility of plantation owners, and to pick cotton and cut sugarcane. For the railroad and the farmers, the rates were cheap and the workers, with whips and guns behind them, were much more productive than the average citizen.

  Yet it is important to be careful. Convict leasing was not created for black men. Louisiana signed its first lease in 1844, when none of the state’s inmates was black. Still, the arrangement was different before and after the Civil War. Before, the convicts were housed in a new penitentiary building in Baton Rouge, where the various lessees had whipped them into faster production at the prison’s textile machines, had readied them for work in society as “manufacturers.” The three-story fortress of cells was modeled after the progressive prisons of its era: places where criminals could both learn a trade and find repentance, by toiling in absolute silence all day and, throughout the remaining hours, by contemplating and praying on their sins. This was considered a great stride forward. Not long ago the preferred punishments had been execution (even for many thefts), branding, public lashing, the stocks. And most recently all the state’s inmates had been lodged in an old New Orleans jail, described by Alexis de Tocqueville after his touring of America: “We saw there men… in the midst of excrement and filth. In locking up criminals, no thought is given to making them better but simply to taming their wickedness; they are chained like wild beasts; they are not refined but brutalized.” So no matter how harsh the Baton Rouge lessees became, the state could tell itself the setting was modern and beneficial.

  Only after the war, with the change in the convict population, was the new penitentiary abandoned. Under James, just a few white convicts stayed behind, to sew striped uniforms for the others. The rest of the men lived in camps at the site of their labor, slept shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip on wooden platforms that rose, one above the other, to within a few feet of the ceiling. Workers were replaced (far more cheaply than slaves) as they perished, the causes of death combinations of disease, malnutrition, and relentless over—work—or a gunshot, as James’s terse records put it, “while attempting to escape.”

  Nothing about the system was a secret. The men “are brutally treated and everyone knows it,” one Louisiana newspaper wrote in 1886. “Corporal punishment is inflicted on the slightest provocation…. Anyone who has travelled along the lines of railroads that run through Louisiana’s swamps… in which the levees are built, has seen these poor devils almost to their waists, delving in the black and noxious mud…. Theirs is a grievous lot a thousand times more grievous than the law ever contemplated they should endure in expiation of their sins.” That same year a committee of the Louisiana legislature investigated some of the camps. One convict, having been forced to work without shoes through the previous winter, had no feet. Frostbite and then gangrene had set in; one foot had rotted off, the other had been amputated with a pen knife. The committee’s report did no
thing to inspire restrictions on Major James.

  With his profits, he bought the plantation of Angola, named for the African region most of its slaves had come from. He set himself up in the Big House, put some of his convicts to work as household servants and others in the fields with the sharecroppers. He had made himself among the richest and most powerful men in the state. He had, in a sense, reversed manumission. He was Louisiana’s last great slaveholder. When he died suddenly, of unknown disease, in 1894, he was sitting on the Big House porch, talking with his family, surrounded by his land and by the men he effectively owned. Without warning he lurched toward the rail, seemed to be trying to vomit, spewed blood instead from his mouth and nostrils, and was gone.

  Again, it is important to be careful. Angola’s beginnings cannot be told as a story of race, not simply, anyway. Major James was condoned by a Reconstructionist legislature: Black representatives voiced no objection to his brutality, only to the encroachment of his cheap labor on the jobs of their constituents. And even at his death, when the percentage of black convicts had climbed near 80, there were still plenty of whites enduring—or failing to endure—his regime. Just as plenty of whites continued to suffer Angola’s cruelty after the end of convict-leasing in 1900. The point is more that race has always been one crucial underlying factor at the penitentiary, in the way it is run, in the way it is viewed by the public. The preponderance of blacks, the reflexive link of “convict” with “black” in almost everyone’s mind, helps to allow certain attitudes, certain things to happen. Like, perhaps, a rodeo that borders on the gladiatorial.

  Of course, the factor of race in the world of prisons is not limited to Angola, to Louisiana, to the South. At Angola, however, race sometimes rises to the surface with unique flair. During the late 1960s at the rodeo, after the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the emcee would ask everyone to remain standing. The inmate band began, “Well I wish I was in the land of cotton…” An old black inmate climbed onto a wooden platform painted with the Confederate flag. Dressed in a Confederate soldier’s gray uniform and cap, he tap-danced for the crowd.

  When Louisiana claimed direct control of its convicts in January, 1901, the motive had little to do with scattered cries for prison reform. The change came through political infighting and a desire for direct profit. In 1914, the man who ran the state’s penal system considered the possibility of rehabilitating his convicts. He concluded that in Louisiana “the vices and defects of the negro race are well known,” that it would be wasteful to apply “what are called the advanced systems of treatment in use in some wealthier states, where only white men are dealt with.”

  Angola was expanded from 8,000 to 18,000 acres through state purchases. Farming gradually took precedence over levee and railroad work for Louisiana’s inmates. When floods made a mockery of financial goals, there were calls for more efficiency. The security staff at Angola was cut from 150 to 11 in 1917; the inmate population was 1,600. Convict guards, given rifles and shotguns and later submachine guns, replaced paid employees. Through the 1960s these trusties were the only armed men in the fields. (Black convicts were placed over black work lines, whites over white.) Even as recently as the ’60s, the warden offered them a six-month reduction in sentence (this before the passage of life without parole) for any escaping inmate they shot.

  How often the convict guards defined “escaping” to suit their own purposes is impossible to sort out. Much more certain is that they themselves rarely tried to flee the prison or even disobey the freemen. They knew their punishment would be loss of weapon, that they would be “swung” from their special dorm back into the main population. Among the men they had lorded over, they would be left to fend for themselves.

  Through the first half of the century, the state remained desperate to operate Angola, if not for profit, then at least without appropriation. Warden after warden failed this standard; whatever else happened at the penitentiary drew little interest. At their camps every morning, men were called out for floggings—twenty, forty, sixty lashes. “Incorrigibles” were kept in a new unit called the Red Hats (named because the inmates wore hats dipped in red paint at the crown, to identify them in the fields). Each of the Red Hat cells was closed off by a steel door and ventilated, in the 95-degree summers, only by a twelve-inch-square window covered by a steel flap. A convict guard had control of the flap. The toilet was the pail you washed in, and you stayed with it through the night.

  Then, in 1951, thirty-seven white inmates severed their achilles tendons with razor blades. They hoped somehow to rescue themselves from the beatings they received in the work lines and the conditions they lived under in the camps. When news of the self-mutilation leaked out, the local and national press swarmed. “If the present efficient leadership at Angola is left alone,” Governor Earl Long spoke in response to the crisis, “Angola will be on a paying basis before I leave office…” Quickly, though, he realized that the public’s indifference to inmate life did not go quite this far. State investigations began; recommendations were announced; plans were drawn up. And the plans were funded. By 1955 Life magazine came down to document a miracle. “Bad Prison Goes Straight,” the headline celebrated, and beside pictures of brand-new buildings the article read: “If any prisoners ever have the right to be happy, then the men at right do…. New Angola has an up-to-date library, schoolrooms, bright modern dormitories…” One caption noted, with a kind of corporate optimism, that the inmates, who had finally shed their broad-striped uniforms, would soon be issued shirts with pinstripes.

  What they wore, by the late ’60s and early ’70s, was dinner trays and mail-order catalogs taped to their chests and backs—for protection from one another while they slept. A few years of state generosity had been followed by renewed neglect; this, and then the phasing out of convict guards, brought pure chaos. By the early ’70s, about 400 employees, spread over three shifts, supervised 4,000 prisoners. A liberal warden, Murray Henderson, had been hired from outside the state. Nobly intentioned, he tried to enlighten security and bring self-help programs to the inmates. But while some in his new team of classification officers lit candles, turned out the lights in their offices at Main Prison, and gathered convicts in circles on the floor to express their feelings, men stabbed each other freely in the dorms. Between 1972 and 1975 there were at least 40 inmate murders. Recorded stabbings totaled 360.

  One man, John Whitley, who began his career in classification in 1970 and later became warden, remembered the convicts, with blankets for stretchers, rushing the wounded toward the hospital. “Back then when you stabbed someone you stabbed him pretty good, and blood would be trailing as they came down the Walk. It was just part of the working conditions. At first I thought this was ridiculous, unbelievable, how could this happen all the time? But it got to the point where I saw a man sitting on a bench in the main hallway trying to hold his intestines in, sitting there waiting for someone to take him over to the hospital, and I looked up and saw a guard on his way down the Walk to take care of it, and I just had no interest. I just walked away and went to work.”

  Four inmates sued the state in federal court. Inside Angola, they claimed, arbitrary discipline, poor medical care, racial segregation, and pervasive, anarchic violence deprived them of their civil rights. The men had spent months, between 1970 and ’71, gathering evidence and conferring secretly with one another, speaking sometimes in pig Latin through the heating ducts when they were kept in cells. At last they described their world to a young lawyer they found: convict guards beating inmates with mop handles in the Red Hats (and men living ten to a 4 by 7-foot cell there); pummelings by groups of paid employees; unchecked rape and murder among the inmates; segregation that kept blacks picking crops while only whites were promoted out of the fields; an often doctorless hospital staffed by a convict named O’Dell Causey. As the lead plaintiff would later recall, Causey had worked as a mortician’s helper before coming to Angola. “And that’s how he learned to sew human bodies. If you were c
ut, O’Dell would stitch you up. He’d try to save your life. Everybody depended on O’Dell, even the free people. O’Dell couldn’t read his name in boxcar letters, but if you took all the pills in the pharmacy and dumped them on the floor, he could pick each one up and tell you its street name, medical name, and what it was used for.”

  A federal magistrate, Frank Polozola, heard the case in the visiting shed at Main Prison. When questions of witness credibility came up, the plaintiffs’ lawyer suggested that he see for himself, that he walk over to the hospital, the cells. Polozola rose from his makeshift bench and went to inspect. He harbored no soft spot for criminals. “He wanted prisoners to be prisoners,” the lead plaintiff recounted, “but man, he had to do right.”

  In 1975, his findings led to federally mandated reforms and increased spending. The state did not readily take heed. The legislature voted funds to expand the LSU football stadium and claimed there was none available for ordered improvements at Angola. But after defeat on appeal, and under the threat of released inmates when the court set impossibly low population limits at the prison, the state surrendered. Angola’s security staff doubled (and soon doubled again), new buildings relieved overcrowding, disciplinary procedures were regulated, doctors were hired, and through earlier agreements worked out during the course of the lawsuit, the last of the convict guards were gone, the dorms and inmate jobs were desegregated, and seventy-five black employees joined what had always been an all-white work force.

  Suddenly, under federal oversight, Angola became what Life had once rushed to call it: a model prison. At least, it was about the closest any large, state penitentiary could come. Within two years, violent deaths dropped to zero. And this at a time when the state became a pioneer in natural life sentences allowing no chance for parole. As my year there began, inmate violence had stayed low, killings remained an exception, and homosexual rape—at least the overt kind, where the victim is simply overpowered—had been largely eliminated. As for abuse by guards, reliable comparative statistics are impossible to come by, but incidents at Angola were, according to Keith Nordyke, a federally appointed civil rights attorney for the inmates, fairly few. And since efforts at redirecting convicts’ lives are a thing of the past all over the country, inmate safety and tolerable conditions are the standards by which penitentiaries are judged. With continued court supervision, Angola excelled.